The race had seen a record-breaking number of lead changes up to that point. Heading into the final caution period Tony Kanaan held the lead, but was passed by the two Ganassi cars of Franchitti and Scott Dixon.

The two red cars continued to swap the lead until Sato split them with two laps to go, before launching his unsuccessful attack on Franchitti. He was classified 17th.

Franchitti fought back from dead last early in the race having been hit by EJ Viso during his first pit stop.

A nasty crash early in the race eliminated series leader Will Power and Mike Conway – and forced Helio Castroneves to take avoiding action to miss hitting a flying wheel:

If Sato would have just been a bit more patient. Would have loved to have seen a normal finish.
But Dario did a great race and is a great champion! Congratulations.
Now up for the coca-cola 600 for the real triple header today :)

I enjoyed those last laps, the rest of it was plain boring. And the ending wasn’t as sweet as I was expecting… damn you Takuma…! it’d have been a perfect sunday: Mark at Monaco, Taku at Indy, but oh well…

Mike Conway has had a couple of wild crashes at Indy. The team didn’t see that his front wing was damaged after he ran into two pit crew members on his last stop. They should have replace the damaged front nose section which caused the crash.

@ajokay I’m not sure about that. We saw throughout the race the timing of getting the slipstream right was crucial. ‘Breathing’ off the throttle to get a run later on the lap was extremely difficult to get right. I think he was right to go for the move but if he had made it stick I wonder if Franchitti would have got him back coming out of the last corner…

@keithcollantine Not sure about that. Sato had the fastest car in those last few laps, and had he made that move stick, Dario would have lost some momentum and would have been more worried about Dixon passing him than him passing Sato into 3.

@F1 Yankee – The cars need to be very strong to handle the stress of the ovals, which is very different than the road courses. A nice bonus with the new car is that they can take some bumping and banging and keep going. The Rear Wheel Guards really cut down on rear tire punctures. I don’t know if they’ll keep the cars on the ground on high speed rear impacts though.

Rubens said “Nothing in my racing life prepared me for those restarts,’’ admitted Rubens Barrichello, whose oval debut was plenty impressive as he ran in the Top 10 much of the day before finishing 11th.